Consensus-Building Is No Longer Possible

Our fractured Parliamentary Democracy, and the Emancipation of Journalism

What happened to the magic of Jon Stewart? When I was very young, I remember the way people would speak of Stewart, a guy who was real, man. Even after he left, he was regarded by people who should know better as a dude who cut through the fog of partisan politics. It is apparent now to sober observers that this was a lie — Stewart was always a liberal consensus backstop. But what changed?

The difference is that in 2007, the people watching Jon Stewart did not have the superhighway of smartphones mainlining information into them on a near-constant basis. In 2007, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok were either in their infancy or did not yet exist. Now, 17 years later, they are omnipresent in the lives of the exact sort of people Jon Stewart is trying to hypnotize. The nodes of information, as well as the sheer mass of it, have expanded to such a degree that the traditional priestly role of consensus-building is utterly impossible.

In the 20th century, there was a sort of détente that could exist held by the twin pillars of parliamentary democracy and the journalist, through his organs of the newspaper and, later, the television. But both of these roles, especially that of the journalist, had the priestly prerogative to censor when it was deemed necessary to achieve consensus. This is now impossible. As Andrey Mir reminds us: “In the world of emancipated authorship, it is impossible to have information and not communicate it.”¹

And what of parliamentary democracy, our democracy? A century ago, Carl Schmitt identified its primary duty and justification as a “dynamic-dialectic, that is, in a process of confrontation of differences and opinions, from which the real political will results. The essence of parliament is therefore public deliberation of argument and counterargument, public debate and public discussion, parley, and all this without taking democracy into account.”²